Computer science has served to insulate programs and programmers
from knowledge of the underlying mechanisms used to manipulate
information, however this fiction is increasingly hard to
maintain as computing devices decrease in size and systems increase
in complexity. Manifestations of these limits appearing in
computers include scaling issues in interconnect, dissipation, and
coding. Reconfigurable Asynchronous Logic Automata (RALA) is
an alternative formulation of computation that seeks to align logical
and physical descriptions by exposing rather than hiding this
underlying reality. Instead of physical units being represented in
computer programs only as abstract symbols, RALA is based on a
lattice of cells that asynchronously pass state tokens corresponding
to physical resources. We introduce the design of RALA, review
its relationships to its many progenitors, and discuss its benefits,
implementation, programming, and extensions.